Ampere Analysis Keynote at Göteborg: 5 Takeaways

Opening this year’s TV Drama Vision at the Göteborg Film Festival, London-based Ampere Analysis’ executive director Guy Bisson spoke about the industry’s current moment of “reinvention” following the seismic five years that saw the COVID-19 pandemic, the writers’ strike and the rise of AI shake business as we know it. In a post-peak-TV world, what opportunities are diminished and what are on the rise? 

Bisson, who also gave Variety a comprehensive look into his research ahead of the festival, called this year’s presentation “From Rubble to Reinvention,” saying we are undergoing a significant moment of disruption that comes around every two decades. “We’ve dismantled the old ways of thinking and doing business and are rebuilding.” Below, a breakdown of the main takeaways from Bisson’s analysis on the current moment for the global market and the evolving TV landscape:

2028: the streaming takeover 

Bisson reiterated that growth in the market is “coming from streaming,” with a 2.5% growth in spending in the last 28 months, and crime commissioning still at the top. Global streamers are still increasing their spend, with licensing growing more strongly than original content spend and originals suffering in this pullback initiative by streamers. Most importantly, he pointed out a key inflection point coming up in 2028: that is the year when, globally, streamers will be spending more than the entire legacy broadcast business put together.

“When it comes to commissioners of brand new content, public and commercial broadcast TV have been dropping significantly,” he added. “That, of course, has a disproportionate impact on Europe and European production, but not particularly significant in the U.S.”

Still, Bisson emphasized that there is “still room for premium,” which is “less important to the whole than it once was, but it’s still important.” “Priorities have shifted. We have gone from a market where, especially when talking about streamers, five years ago, it was basically all about premium drama. That’s what their strategy was based on. They didn’t have much reality TV, formats, light entertainment or sports. They do now.”

Of course, public and commercial broadcasters are still “very significant commissioners,” especially in Europe. “In 2025, legacy players are still more important than streamers. This moment is about change, everything is shifting balances, it’s not all black and white or either or. We are talking about a market that is struggling to find its feet because of the huge disruption that has happened in the last five years.”

Unscripted and sport are here to stay

Coinciding with the launch of ad tiers on streamers, unscripted has now matched scripted in terms of first-run new commissions. “Surely it’s the change from streamers looking for market share, where unscripted is far more cost-effective,” observed Bisson. “Once you’ve got those customers, which frankly Netflix has and they have saturated many markets, you don’t use high-value content for customer maintenance. Obviously, you still need some, which is why there is still a strong demand for premium drama, but you can use lower-value content to do that as well. Also, because of the ad model, instead of bingeing, you want longevity of viewing to get repeat engagement week in, week out. The reality TV format is good for that.”

In this landscape, sport has seen major growth, with Bisson highlighting how it’s “still early days” in the market, but it has “already become a nightmare” given “deep-pocketed streamer competition will push up the cost.” 

“If you go from spending nothing on sport to spending significant amounts, that means you’ve got less available for other projects,” the analyst points out. “Proportionately, streamers now spend about 13% of their total content budget on sport, and that’s from nothing a few years ago. There’s 13% that is no longer going on TV and film.”

 “Where is the ceiling for sports on streaming? Well, pay TV spends half its budget, and broadcasters spend around a third. If streamers get up to the level of traditional TV in terms of pay, we are talking about very significant amounts of money. Netflix alone would be between $9 billion or $10 billion going on sports if it matched pay TV levels of investment based on its annual program budget.”

The interest in sports does, however, present a major opportunity for producers: companion programming. Content about sports, such as Netflix’s “Formula 1: Drive to Survive,” has been a big growth area, as well as entertainment programming focused on sports. 

Consolidation: the Netflix x Warner Bros. deal

Bisson pointed out how, following the Netflix-Warner Bros. deal, there has been a lot of talk in the industry about consolidation. The expert said such major deals stem from the “single most important change in the industry” over the last decade: “for the first time ever, we have global platforms in an industry that was built on geographic licensing, segmentation and distribution.”

“All business models are converging on streaming, driven by the fact that the audience is converging on streaming and you have to follow the eyeballs,” he added. “If you’re a legacy player, you need to find a way to get some of the growth from the areas that are still growing, mainly online video and streaming. That’s why we’re seeing increasing collaboration between broadcasters and streamers. This is what I’d call diagonal integration.”

“Big content owners and producers are increasingly vertically integrated with an owned and operated distribution layer. That’s their streaming platforms. The Warner Bros. and Netflix deal is kind of a backwards vertical deal in that Netflix feels the need to have a massive content asset to feed its voracious appetite for content that will, of course, also bring HBO Max into that vertical relationship. In a way, this is both vertical since it’s content plus distribution, but also diagonal, since it’s legacy media with streaming growth. This is what the deal is all about.”

“A new third-party distribution layer”: the YouTube issue

While looking at what kind of content suffered the biggest investment pullback in recent years, Bisson highlighted comedy and documentary as the most disproportionate in decline. The expert added that one of the theories around this decline is the rise of YouTube, which offers a wealth of kids’ and non-fiction content. “We’re seeing the impact of the rise of social media and particularly the rise of YouTube on TV.”

So, is YouTube television? Bisson’s answer to that is that YouTube is “on television, and that’s the important thing.”

“Because of its global reach and, of course, its younger audiences and its phenomenal ability to sell advertising, YouTube has become an important distribution layer for anyone sitting in the streaming or legacy content distribution space.” Legacy players now have a “distribution value conundrum” where they are losing young audiences while broadcast audiences are ageing at an “alarming rate,” causing a “vicious circle.” This landscape has caused an increase in distribution partnerships, like Spain’s RTVE and Amazon, Channel 4 and Spotify and France’s TF1 and Netflix.

These partnerships, Bisson says, “only solve the problem up to the point that distribution becomes cannibalistic and you shift the power dynamic entirely towards social platforms. That’s a problem because of the CPM (cost-per-mile) imbalance.” This is because content costs for streamers and broadcasters are very high, while YouTube’s costs are very low. Solutions to that problem include: using YouTube as a complementary promotional platform; increasing ads to bring the volume of advertising up to compensate for the difference in value; or, the most common, controlling ad sales for your content on YouTube, creating a two-tier CPM where higher-value content requires higher-value ads.

Microdramas: what are the opportunities?

The latest iteration of crossover content, short-form content, is massively successful on YouTube, with Bisson stating that this form of content is being consumed on mobile as well as the big screen. So what are the opportunities? “Microdramas are the latest attempt to leverage short-form vertical video with a professional wrapper.” It is currently big in Asia, Turkey and Brazil, non-coincidentally, regions where telenovelas are immensely popular. Those are the big opportunity territories. 

Bisson also added that microdrama viewers skew towards particular genres: romance, drama, horror, sci-fi, music and, interestingly, sport. The early adopters, which he called “super consumers,” also watch significantly more content than the average viewer, with 37 minutes more on average a day. “They are already looking at social as a platform for TV content.”

AI: Let’s circle back 

To Bisson, the “real and imminent threat of AI” is not actually to professional production but to the creator economy. During his presentation, the expert played an extremely realistic AI-generated clip of a food influencer, created in a few seconds at no cost. “The ease of production and low to zero cost to generate AI online content potentially leads to single entities or organizations that can run influencer armies that effectively operate at zero cost across multiple genres. With a day’s work, I could create 50 cooking influencers, 50 travel influencers…”

“At what point do viewers begin to see influencers for what they truly are, which is overt marketing conduits, and begin shifting their viewing loyalty back to premium, human-generated content?”

“These markets are key to the future of the market”